


Be Still (For There Is Strange Music)

by ncfan



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Case Fic, Follow-Up To An Episode, Gen, MAG S01 E24 Strange Music, POV Female Character, Sort of--it's in third-person pov and not first-person pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-30
Updated: 2018-10-30
Packaged: 2019-08-11 01:20:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16465973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Leanne Dennikin takes a second job playing the piano at a club. It's not what she thought it would be.





	Be Still (For There Is Strange Music)

**Author's Note:**

> So for Halloween, I decided to write something close to a Magnus Archives case fic, except this is in third-person POV because I didn’t feel like doing first-person POV like the statements are.

Leanne Dennikin had always loved music. In spare moments throughout her life, you could find her listening to music on her phone, her mp3 player, her CD player, her cassette player, even her eight-track player, which served to date her pretty thoroughly, but eight-track tapes (some of them, anyways) were collectibles, and Leanne had had to sell some from time to time when she needed extra cash on short notice. Her mother used to tell her she’d be deaf by the time she was thirty, but here she was, past thirty with her hearing unscathed.

Leanne had always loved music. It was something instilled in her by her granddad, and had survived his death. Been stoked by his death, no matter what you might think of her experiences with the calliope organ—its being stolen had long since ceased to bother her, apart from the locks seeming to have been torn off, and what that implied. She could play several instruments, and after her granddad died, she took it upon herself to finish what he had started and learned to play the piano.

Lessons cost a bit of money, but Leanne picked up the knowledge quickly. _Very_ quickly; her tutor was as shocked as she was pleased with the speed of Leanne’s progress. But she didn’t understand the way making music made Leanne feel, didn’t understand what it was to be weightless and centered at the same time, so of course she was shocked. It didn’t matter that much what her tutor thought. It didn’t take her long to master the piano.

That lifelong love of music served Leanne well when she found herself a bit short on cash and needed to find a source of income beyond her job at the shop. There were a lot of fairly nice, but not exactly high-end, clubs and other music scenes in her area that might want a musician who could play the instruments that she could. It was worth checking out, at least.

There was one, well, it was sort of a cross between a bar and a café named _The Orpheus_ that Leanne liked to visit when she had free time. It was clean, the coffee was good and the booze even better, and the music had always been to her tastes. The atmosphere of the place was alright—patrons rarely gave their full attention to singer or musician, but they were clearly listening, and were properly appreciative.

When Leanne learned that _The Orpheus_ had an opening for a musician to play a few nights a week, she scheduled an appointment the same day. No way was she going to pass up an opportunity like _that_. She’d seen oboists and cellists play before, but what the hiring manager told her was that what they really needed was a pianist. The last one had quit without notice; nobody even knew where he was.

The hiring manager, a middle-aged woman named Aleksandra Martin with graying hair and a perpetually-discontented expression on her face, sat down at one of the tables close to the stage to listen to Leanne play a few pieces of music she had selected. All were decidedly _not_ at a beginner’s level, and were diverse enough that it wasn’t always the easiest thing to switch over when Leanne got to a new piece.

But Leanne did pretty well—at least, the fact that Aleksandra offered her the job immediately after completing the audition tended to lend itself to that conclusion. That discontented look had vanished from her face. What replaced it was a little abstracted, a little foggy. When Leanne had finished the last piece and stood up from this piano, Aleksandra had started a little, as if being startled out of a daydream. Leanne would start next Tuesday, she said, and the work uniform was to wear all-black clothing.

It was funny, but Leanne would have thought there was a little more that went into vetting potential musicians than that. But she wasn’t going to complain if it put more money in her pocket.

The weekend raced by, and soon it was Tuesday, time for Leanne’s first day playing the piano at _The Orpheus_. Some might have been nervous, but Leanne had never been overly-burdened with stage fright. She had the performer’s gift, her granddad used to say, though when he said it, it had always been with a mix of pride and something taut, something she couldn’t place.

When it was time to begin, Leanne took her seat at the piano. It looked like someone had polished it since she had last played it, because the black lid of the rather small grand piano gleamed like black glass or polished obsidian, and the white keys were so glossy and clean that Leanne could make out her reflection in their surface when she looked down on them. The light pouring down on her was hot, and she knew she’d be drenched in sweat by the time she got off the stage, but she didn’t care. She felt buoyant, every part of her just thrumming with giddy anticipation.

The singer started her song, and Leanne followed two notes behind. The piece she was starting off with tonight was a melody that started low and deep, like a rumbling deep in the earth as tectonic plates shifted with agonizing slowness. As time went on, the song picked up speed until it was… not fast, properly, but it seemed positively racing after that slow beginning.

All such considerations fell away as Leanne began to feel herself be overtaken by that familiar ecstasy, the ecstatic joy that accompanied the process of musical creation. The light overhead didn’t exactly blind her to the audience, but it made them mostly haze out of existence, and this close to the source of the music, it was easy to let the piano music drown out the strains of the singer at her own work. She just let herself be carried away with the music, let it sing and scream in her veins. Let her troubles drift away.

When the song drew to a close and Leanne’s part was over, it took a while for her to look up from the piano. She was mesmerized by her reflection in the glossy white keys, and her fingers ached for more work to do. Every time she drew to a close on any instrument, she always felt this way, frustrated and unfulfilled.

It was the silence that finally drove her to look up from the piano. Normally, after the end of a song, you could immediately hear murmuring and scattered applause, but this time there was nothing but a silence so profound that Leanne _had_ to look up, just to make certain that she wasn’t the only person left in the club.

No, the club was not empty. It was just that everyone was silent, that everyone was looking at her.

 _Everyone_ in the club was looking directly at Leanne. The patrons sitting at their tables, the servers, the bartender, even the singer, were all staring at Leanne. She might have called it ‘raptly,’ except that every one of them had that same abstracted, slightly foggy look that Aleksandra had had after Leanne had concluded her audition.

Well, not everyone. In one or two, Leanne saw for just a second a flash of something brighter, almost frantic. But it was gone in a second, and she was able to tell herself that she’d just imagined it.

And like Aleksandra, the audience, servers, bartender, and singer all started a little when Leanne straightened. The audience broke into a scattered applause that gradually grew louder and more robust, until it was like the constant rolling of thunder from an angry sky. Contrary to every other night Leanne had ever been in the club, no one left until the music was done. No one filed out to make an appointment or assignation, no one left to get some sleep before heading out to work in the morning, and no one left because they just didn’t like the turn the music had taken. If someone’s phone went off, it was ignored or swiftly silenced. They all just sat, and watched, and listened.

Leanne couldn’t help but feel rather proud of herself. After all, she’d _never_ been in the club during a night when the entire audience stayed until the music was completely done. She must have been doing something right to get that kind of result.

She didn’t, didn’t remember her dreams for the next couple of nights. Leanne knew she’d been dreaming. When one wakes up covered in sweat with their heart racing in the middle of November, it’s safe to assume that that person has been dreaming. But she didn’t remember any of it, and the sensations of fear faded so quickly that she might have thought she’d dreamed that, if not for the fact that she wound up needing to take another shower once she woke up, the uneasy odor of stale sweat clinging to her hair and skin.

The next night she played at _The Orpheus_ yielded up much the same results, except that Leanne thought the audience was larger this time. She’d never really bothered to count, but if she had to guess, she’d say that a good night at the club saw a crowd of roughly twenty-five people there at a time, at the most crowded. The place didn’t get _that_ crowded—there were always a few empty tables, still, and several empty booths in the back—but that was a decent-sized crowd for a club this size. She didn’t have that much time to count before sitting down at the piano, but she thought there might have been maybe thirty people here this time.

Well, there was one other thing. Leanne wasn’t listening too hard, being as absorbed in the piano music as she was, but after she left for the night, it occurred to her that she couldn’t remember whether the singer had been singing.

And this time, when Leanne stopped playing and looked out into the audience, among the applause and the cheers she couldn’t mistake what she was seeing in the eyes of some of the people watching her. She didn’t know why, couldn’t imagine why, but what she saw in their eyes for one fleeting moment was fear.

It was the third night Leanne performed at _The Orpheus_ that she first noticed the doll people. She was still half-inclined sometimes to think she was overreacting, but what had happened to Josh did a lot of work towards convincing herself that, at the very least, what she was seeing in the shadowed back booths of the club wasn’t completely spun from her imagination. Leanne trusted her eyes, and what her eyes were showing her was something that wasn’t normal. Maybe wasn’t human.

She went up to the stage and started on the piano just as she had twice before, though there was a small strain of something that wasn’t quite energized enough to be unease making her heart beat a little faster than it otherwise would have. She listened harder this time, and was certain that the singer wasn’t actually singing at all. Moreover, there was a saxophonist up on stage tonight as well, and he wasn’t playing, either. For as long as the lights were on over the stage and the attention of everyone in the club fixated upon Leanne, she was the only person in the entire club making a single sound.

Leanne never asked them afterwards why they didn’t sing or play. She wasn’t certain she wanted to know the answer. And it was when that silence impressed itself upon her from over the strains of the piano that she truly began to feel afraid.

But that fear did not abate when the piece Leanne was to play came to a close, and she looked away from the piano to the audience down below the stage. Some of the people sitting in the booths in the shadowy back of the club were… different, than they had been when she had started. At least Leanne thought they were different. She hadn’t looked very hard.

Some of the people sitting in the shadowy booths in the back of the club were… strange. Not normal. It was only two or three of them, and what was wrong with them wasn’t overt, wasn’t so obvious that Leanne could do anything more than just look at them, trying in vain to make sense of what she was seeing in a way that didn’t lead her mind straight to ‘possessed dolls.’

It was the eyes. It really was deeply shadowed in the back of the club, and Leanne couldn’t make out much more of their features than that, but the eyes caught the light. Caught the light a little too much, and as Leanne watched for longer and longer, while the rest of the club just didn’t move, didn’t move this time even though she’d stopped playing, she watched them and realized they weren’t blinking. Their eyes were reflected light like polished glass, and they never blinked.

Leanne didn’t know why she kept coming back to the club after that. Yes, she needed the money, still, but she could have found other ways to get it; she didn’t really _need_ to go back there. She didn’t _want_ to go back to the club, didn’t want to risk seeing those doll people again, didn’t want to confront the unnaturally still and silent audience. But she kept going back, her feet kept carrying her back to that place even when she didn’t intend it, even for nights when she wasn’t scheduled to play. It was like she was a puppet in a play, and she had only one task, one track for the strings.

The next time, it was four people with glassy doll eyes. Then, five, then seven, then ten. Then they weren’t just sitting in the shadowy booths anymore, but at the tables all the way up to the foot of the stage, and Leanne could look at them and see how their skin looked a little plastic, their hair a little like the horsehair on an old-fashioned hairbrush, their limbs just a little too stiff. Their faces were painted with frozen smiles that leered like the rictus of the dying.

One night, Leanne found herself… somewhere. She thought it might have been _The Orpheus_ —that was where her feet had always carried her before, when she found herself walking without her own will, and the piano was the same—but she couldn’t say for certain. The only light was over the stage, and everything past the tables closest to the stage was in darkness. Sitting at the few tables that she could see were life-sized dolls. Not doll people, not people with some of the qualities of a doll, but actual dolls. They watched her with unblinking glass eyes and frozen smiles.

Her fingers moved over the keys of their own accord. There was no sheet music. She wasn’t playing any of the songs she had ever been asked to play at _The Orpheus_. She was playing Faster, Faster, and her fingers were a blur over the keys. There was something hot and terrible building in her chest the more she played, the faster it got, and as she reached the point where she was drumming on the keys more quickly than any human should have been capable of, it felt like it was burning its way out, like it would burst from her chest and leave a smoldering hole behind.

Behind her, there was the staccato drumming of a pair of feet hitting the floor over and over again, but Leanne could not turn to see what it was.

She didn’t remember leaving, but then, she hadn’t remembered arriving, either.

Leanne was starting to see the doll people outside of the club, now. Was seeing the flash of gleaming glass eyes or sunlight hitting false skin too brightly when she was walking down the street. Maybe she should just move.


End file.
